Do you have a source for this? I have never heard this and I very much doubt it is true. If you look at the "Paying Taxes Report" from the world bank + PWC, the UK has a yearly time to comply of 110 hours - versus 175 hours USA, 207 hours Germany, 330 hours Japan... Time to comply isn't a perfect metric of course, but all the classical "easy tax" countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore, HongKong, Ireland have even lower numbers than the UK, so there is at least a correlation. (If you control for economically comparable factors)